A client in a wireless local area network (WLAN) associates with an access point (AP) to get connectivity, for example, to and from the Internet, and to further communicate with other clients via the WLAN. A client typically relies on one AP at any given time for all communications in the WLAN. Also, each AP in the WLAN is assigned a channel, and the clients connected to the AP use the channel to communicate with the AP. A channel may be a channel as defined by a standard, such as an 802.11 standard. The channel may be a frequency band.
When there are multiple APs, the channels used by each of the APs should be carefully assigned so that neighboring APs do not interfere with each other. Therefore, most channel assignment processes consider the interference relationship between APs. However, a client associated with an AP can interfere with another AP or can interfere with clients connected to different APs, even when the APs do not interfere with each other. Hence, conventional channel assignment processes are highly susceptible to interference caused by clients connected to neighboring APs, especially when the WLAN is dense. This can result in failed or degraded network performance that can seriously impact real-time applications, such as voice-over-IP or streaming video and also impact the performance of non-real-time applications.